Annette Lu points finger at Control Yuan over probes

By Chris Wang / Staff reporter

Thu, Sep 20, 2012 - Page 3

Former vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) yesterday appealed to the Control Yuan, accusing prosecutors of engaging in a “selective investigation” and malicious prosecution in a corruption case in which Lu was found not guilty.

Lu said she would like to highlight two episodes of misconduct by the Supreme Prosecutors Office’s Special Investigation Division (SID), saying the division’s selective investigations only went after pan-green camp officials and violated the principle of presumption of innocence, adding that its prosecution cases were malicious.

The SID ignored hundreds of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) officials who were also involved in controversial lawsuits and opted to go after Democratic Progressive Party politicians, the former vice president said.

Lu and former Presidential Office secretary-general Yu Shyi-kun (游錫堃) were found not guilty on July 2 by the Taipei District Court of using fraudulent receipts to claim state affairs funds during their stint in the Presidential Office, almost five years after they were charged.

A separate case in which Lu, Yu and former foreign minister Mark Chen (陳唐山) were charged with using fraudulent receipts to claim special allowance funds were also dropped on the same day, with the district court saying that an amendment approved last year by the legislature stipulates that no officials would be prosecuted for suspicious reimbursements from special allowance funds that took place before Dec. 31, 2006.

Lu said the appeal was filed not only on her behalf, but for the 6,500 government officials involved in the cases, a by-product of the longstanding political division between the pan-blue and pan-green camps.

Citing statistics compiled by the Ministry of Justice, Lu said the conviction rate for corruption-related cases as of December last year was 60.8 percent, which means that “40 percent of those who were indicted were eventually proved innocent, but not before lengthy, painful and expensive legal proceedings.”

It is unprecedented in the history of the Constitution of the Republic of China for a former vice president to submit such an appeal, Control Yuan member Huang Huang-hsiung (黃煌雄) said, adding that the Control Yuan would cautiously deal with the appeal.